Weaviate Newsletter - New Getting Started guide and Weaviate 1.15 heads up

Hi Weaviate friends!!!

This week the Weaviate Community slack has welcomed its 1000th member. It is absolutely amazing to see so many people joining the Weaviate community and helping each other every day.

I wonder 🤔 how long until we will welcome the 10'000th member.

Docs Improvements

In the last few weeks, we've been working on multiple improvements to Weaviate's documentation. With updates to the navigation flow, the addition of the Core Knowledge section and the refreshed Getting Started with Weaviate guide.

Getting Started guide

We are particularly happy about publishing the new Getting Started guide, where you follow a few steps to get started:

1. Installation

2. Schema

3. Import

4. Query

Check it out to refresh your knowledge, or share it with your friends to get them on a Vector Train 🚅 with Weaviate.

Weaviate 1.15 heads up

📣 As a heads up, we are currently tying up the last knots for the next release of Weaviate Core v1.15 – scheduled for early next week.

The next release will include:

• support for cloud-native backups

• performance improvements for ordered imports

• more efficient filtered aggregations

• support for new distance metrics

• memory improvements

• 2 new transformers

• and more

We will share more info next week with the release.

Content

On the content front, we have a few interesting pieces that share with you.

✍️ Read Research Insights - Learning to Retrieve Passages without Supervision - by Connor Shorten - to learn how Spider can be used to Self-Supervised label data for contrastive ML model training. This post has it all, an overview of Spider, a Colab Notebook with running code, and comparisons of Spider vs Supervised ML model training techniques.

🎙If you find self-supervised learning interesting, you should watch the latest Weaviate Podcast – Learning to Retrieve Passages without Supervision – with Ori Ram and our Connor - where they further dive into the topic.

🎙Listen to MLOps Weekly Podcast - Vector Embeddings & AI-First Databases - where Simba Khadder sat down with SeMI Technologies CEO, Bob van Luijt, to discuss the magic of ML embeddings & the power of vector databases in production!

Events

🕺 Our Marcin Antas – Weaviate Core developer – presented at GoWroc (a Go meetup based in Wrocław, Poland) on "Vector Search Databases".

It was great to see Marcin in action, with multiple live-coding demos and many engaging conversations after the session. (See some pictures below)

📣 Give us a shout if you know of any great meetups or conferences in your area that would be great for us to speak at. This could be a good way for some of us to meet in person 😀